Blocked Internet firms on Chinese charm offensive

Google, Facebook and Twitter are all banned in China, but the Internet giants’ top executives are increasingly frequent visitors to Beijing as they seek opportunity and profit from the world’s second-largest economy, despite concerns over censorship.

Google terminated most of its operations in mainland China in 2010 after controversy over the country’s online controls and an attack on users of its Gmail service.

But Eric Schmidt, its former CEO and now president of its new parent company Alphabet, was in Beijing last week declaring: "We never left China.”

“We would very much like to serve all of China," he told a Techcrunch forum. "We continue to chat with the government."

Google has kept around 500 employees in Beijing and Shanghai, mainly selling advertising spots to Chinese companies.

The country's Communist authorities operate vast limits on Internet access, dubbed the Great Firewall of China, and exercise formidable censorship within their cyber borders.

Facebook has been blocked since 2009, its photo-sharing subsidiary Instagram has been unavailable since last year's pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, and Twitter and Google-owned YouTube are inaccessible.

Nonetheless, the CEOs of several Silicon Valley giants lined up to be photographed alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping during his state visit to the United States in September.

When China's top Internet official Lu Wei visited Facebook's headquarters last year he was photographed at CEO Mark Zuckerberg's desk -- with Xi's book The Governance of China next to the billionaire's laptop.

Facebook claims more than a billion active daily users, and China's 668 million Internet users represent a huge potential market -- if access to it is ever unblocked.

Zuckerberg's Chinese-language speech to Tsinghua University in Beijing last year caused a sensation, and he was back last month to remind students of a Chinese proverb urging perseverance: “If you work hard enough, you can grind an iron bar down to a fine needle. With patience, you can change the world.”

Caption: Representative Image

Photo: www.hongkongfp.com